A Curious Little Blog

(This is inspired by an article by James Taranto called "What Went Wrong With Human Rights?"   The original Wall Street Journal article is paywalled, but it isn't too hard to find the full text of the article elsewhere.) Conservatives generally are big believers in natural law.  It was a given for most of the founders, and it serves to underpin the fact that people have rights ("natural rights") that are prior to government.  These rights aren't granted by government, and therefore can't be taken away from them.  All the government can do is to secure the rights, or, as the case sometimes is, not secure them. The idea of natural law is a very old one and is based on the principle that reason dictates certain rules -- for example, that one person may not harm another without cause.  On the other side is "positive law," which consists of agreements made by people, such as laws passed by a legislature or a treaty agreed between nations.  Most ...

In a recent piece in his journal " Current Affairs ," Nathan Robinson shows that he is a talented writer and debater. He also shows that he is willing to employ his talents to be deceptive; in this case, to claim that Brett Kavanaugh is a "serial liar." Since he makes the argument in such depth and with such a superficial air of plausibility, it is worth spending some time showing why it is wrong. To set up his case, Robinson admits that there is no evidence other than Ford's word to support her case. "S omeone strongly committed to due process," he writes, "might think the allegation extremely weak." But, he continues, prosecuting sexual assault would be almost impossible if we used this standard of evidence; therefore, we have to consider the case based solely on the testimony provided by Ford and Kavanaugh. Robinson has apparently attended law school, so one would expect him to know that rape rarely comes down to a simple ...